I was watching a documentary on Youtube recently called Windrush about the experiences of immigrants from the Caribbean into Britain, from the Empire Windrush docking in 1948 up to the mid 90s. In one section it made a point about Millie’s Number 1 single My Boy Lollipop- after the Notting Hill riots of 1958, when Oswald Mosley stirred up six weeks of white on black violence in London, many black residents felt they got no protection from the police and formed themselves into self-protection groups. The press reaction was generally one of ‘race riots- this sort of thing doesn’t happen here’. In 1964 Millie’s utterly infectious song sold by the bucketload and some talking heads argued that this single helped heal the wounds of Notting Hill, helped Black Britons be seen more positively and gave them something to sing about. One now elderly Jamaican gentleman said the My Boy Lollipop was also the start of the swinging sixties, just as much as any record by lovable moptops, that clubland in London was really swinging to Jamaican influenced sounds. Which is a nice piece of perspective.